They Write Their Dream on the Rocks Forever: Rock Writings in the Stein River Valley of British Columbia

PREFACE

RICHARD DALY

The first edition of this book came out in 1993 as ammunition for saving the Stein Valley, which has since been preserved for traditional uses. Much of the area is enjoyed today as parkland with consultation and management by the local Nlaka’pamux people.

This book’s subject is the red ochre writings executed by Indigenous people on the rocks along banks of the Stein River, a tributary of the Fraser near its confluence with the Thompson River at Lytton, in southern British Columbia.¹ In writing about this phenomenon we have found it necessary to reconcile the oral and written traditions of the different Indigenous and European cultures familiar to the three authors.

Chris Arnett and I are from cultures other than Annie York’s Oral Tradition. We are schooled in documentation, in turning words into things² by writing them down. We have attempted to integrate these disparate traditions in a form of dialogue that you can see, hear, and read. The dialogue deals with the history, form, meaning, and significance of one of the oldest and longest human traditions: recording experiences on stone for others to read. The core of this book is Annie’s detailed explanations of these rock writings. The tasks that Chris and I have set ourselves are to illustrate Annie’s work and put it in as full a context as possible.

Annie York and Arthur Urquhart, the cousin for whom Annie kept house at Spuzzum, British Columbia, for sixty years, listened to all the old stories when they were very young. The old people sat them down on those infinitely long, dark winter evenings of childhood and led them into the ancient stories. Arthur was not very forthcoming about the process, but Annie explained how, as she listened, time after time, to the narratives, she could visualize the characters, the situations, the teachings given to the first humans, and the very real places where the stories happened. Now, many years later, we offer Annie’s telling of the same stories as food for the readers’ imaginations.

To explain the rock writings, Annie takes the reader into the realm of Vision Quests, where members of Nlaka’pamux society and their neighbours were encouraged by their Elders to engage in a rite of passage, to make the ageless journey in search of strength and power from the living world around them. This entailed a separation from society, a solitary testing and initiation into other ways of being, and then a return to society strengthened by the new knowledge and experience. Going on a spiritual quest was associated with all training for special skills and talents in Nlaka’pamux society, especially for determining who might become, to use some English terms, a clairvoyant, a mentally focused hunter, or a Shamanic healer. Shamanism, a problematic term, is used here to refer to a phenomenon more extensive than the actions and beliefs of an Indigenous healer. It is used here to include the practice of striving to relate to the vast network of energies in the universe by psychic explorations into different meditational planes of being and neurological thinking processes. Since Paleolithic times this search for meaning has been driven by the thirst for knowledge and intellectual continuity in a universe marked by instability, motion, change, and transformation.³

Spiritual Questing, a central feature of Shamanism in which the aspirant tries to experience the flux, motion, and change behind the things of everyday life, is a constant theme in human history. Shamanism is one of the approaches used by those who seek these experiences and, like the scientific method, it has been recognized in many cultures for the materiality of its procedures and the regularity of its revelations.

With the onset of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, and the subsequent era of colonial conquest and applied science that diffused across the world, the Shamanic search was gradually exorcized from everyday life and relegated to the realms of the exotic and the mystical. Shamanic practices have been categorized by scholars as magical, animistic, and supernatural; to missionaries and colonial administrators these practices and beliefs were paganistic, satanic, idolatrous, and superstitious. All of these categorizing words are freighted with connotations that deny the everyday reality of this form of human activity and lock it away in closed, and largely unexamined, cognitive categories that are labelled irrational, immoral, or both. Often these unexamined phenomena are erroneously dismissed as nonsense:

Nonsense is that which does not fit into the prearranged patterns which we have superimposed on reality. There is no such thing as nonsense, apart from a judgmental intellect which calls it that.

True artists and true physicists know that nonsense is only that which, viewed from our present point of view, is unintelligible. Nonsense is nonsense only when we have not yet found that point of view from which it makes sense. (Zukav 1980, 117)

In Indigenous societies in the watershed of the Fraser River in British Columbia, the Shamanic process was an ordinary part of life. The preliminary stages of Shamanic training were common to most Nlaka’pamux and their neighbours insofar as the majority of young people were sent out into the forests, after receiving stories and instructions from their Elders – in Annie’s words, to sƛíq; that is, embark on what is generally called a Vision Quest. Those who succeeded in obtaining one or more spiritual guides and helpers through this process were in a good position to succeed in the practice of special talents, such as fortune-telling, healing, weaving, hunting, speech-making, archiving local history, carving, or canoe-building.

One such talent was that of the Shaman, or Səxʷnéʔm,⁴ who possessed the ability to heal the body by healing the patient’s afflicted mind and spirit. Annie was trained in the healing skills of the Syúwe, the herbal medicine doctor. Many of the young men, at least in the generation of Annie’s Elders, trained to become expert hunters. Few were selected for the esoteric training of the Shaman. Only those judged by the Elders to be adequately talented were chosen. At one level, the training procedures, as well as the imagery and the understanding of ancient narratives and outlooks, were part of the culture shared by all members of the society. Then, as a young person progressed into more specialized training, the elaborations of knowledge, history, and procedure which he or she obtained were pulled from the treasury of incorporeal, or intellectual, family property. For example, everyone knew how to conduct a Sweatlodge purification, but to induce specific moods for certain types of dreaming, Elders taught their descendants which tree needles and herbs should be combined and burned on the red glowing rocks of the Sweathouse. This was esoteric family knowledge, carefully protected from outsiders.

The protection of this intellectual property, and of the mystique which it engenders, remains an aspect of authority and informal ranking among Indigenous Peoples of the region. This feature of the social structure grows more pronounced as one approaches the shores of the Pacific, and less pronounced as one moves upriver and away from the coast.⁵

Shamanic knowledge was closely guarded by practitioners and by certain families. Decisions as to when and how much of this incorporeal property could be revealed to the wider community were made consultatively by the most mature and experienced members of the extended family. An important reason for this caution and control in relation to Shamanic procedure, and associated rock art or rock writing, has long been a deep concern for the vulnerability of one’s family to the psychic powers of witchcraft or to accusations of practicing witchcraft. In recent centuries, censure by missionaries only exacerbated the cloak of secrecy which had long enshrouded these practices.

Today, confronted by inroads by other cultures, and by a century of administrative control by the Federal Department of Indian Affairs (Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development), even fewer Indigenous people retain knowledge of these procedures. Those who do know will point out, for instance, that great strength and power can be derived from rocky places where water moves down through the mountains and hills on its way out to sea. Such a place is the Stein, or Stʕáyn, the hidden river, which disgorges into the Fraser near the present town of Lytton. For millennia, people have visited such places to allay their hungers – hungers of the body and of the mind and spirit.

When one talks to Indigenous people who have lived and dreamed in such places, in the hills and along the rivers, one is taken back in their stories to the beginning of conscious time; to their earliest accounts of human strivings for elemental answers to questions about the human condition: Where did we come from, and why do we exist?

In the teaching stories that the old people use, one is taken to places where people first sought to make a living on the land, where they made their first efforts to feed themselves, to raise their children, to order the world around them and invest it with meaning. Here in southern British Columbia, one is guided back in time to the ancient era which scholars have called the Mythological Age: the era of the Transformer Beings who travelled the Fraser River and the adjacent coast, separating the first beings into humans and animals, instructing the early people how to live and work with one another and with the world around them.

The Transformers helped the Old One, the Creator, in His task of evolving and developing, often by trial and error, the creatures of the earth. Some of the first conscious beings were transformed into animals:

The beings who inhabited the world during the mythological age, until the time of the transformers, were called spta’kL. They were men with animal characteristics. They were gifted in magic and their children reached maturity in a few months. They were finally transformed into real animals. (Teit 1900, 337)

Others were welded into humans with their present-day form. Both humans and animals were sometimes transformed to stone and left on the landscape to educate the coming generations:

Most of the rocks and bowlders [sic] of remarkable shape are considered as transformed men or animals of the mythological period. (Teit, 337)

For the same reason, some were turned into stars in the sky (Teit, 341). Even today it is said that all the flora and fauna retain an elusive, human-like form of consciousness that harkens back to the mythological era. Spirit-Quest training, fasting, Sweating, dreaming, and other exercises prepare the acolyte to make contact with these forces of consciousness, these powers of the spirit. These spirit beings appear in many different forms in dreams. One of these forms is what Teit called a race of dwarfs who inhabit steep cliffs and forests (339):

They inhabit low, dense forests, or live in dense woods in the mountains. It is said that they never kill, steal, or chase people. Some people believe they are cedartrees, or their spirits, and that they have the power of transforming themselves. They are rather fond of joking and playing tricks on people. (Teit, 340)

Annie York identified one of the rock writing panels in the Stein as dream portraits of these Cedar People (fig. 119):

They’re spirit faces. The top one is Sqéyep, from the cedar tree. You just try it some day in a lonely place. You sleep under the cedar. The bigger the tree, the better it is. It’ll come to you. It’s a beautiful song.

Cedar has other spirit forms too. Arthur and I seen the x̣ iq̓ic̓eʔ. That’s a cedar root that looks human … Then a third of the Cedar People might come to you too. Tsakwai’iken, and she has the form of a golden snake. She cries, just like a kid too. If you hear her singing, she’s gonna follow you around. Not many see that one …

That cedar dreaming is where the real winter dance, the s ƛ sƛíq comes from. Power comes out of that cedar in winter.

The teachings are given to the young as soon as they reach the age of understanding. Teachings come in the form of instructions and stories which speak of elemental things – of birth and death, of the stars, of the earth and the sun, of fire and water. However, today’s Elders are forced to look for new ways to express these elemental things, and they do so increasingly in English, the mother tongue of many of their grandchildren. The grandchildren have changed; their experience of life and the land is quite different from that of their grandparents.

Although in some cases the old people only partially understand the European cultural connotations of the English words, they feel impelled to try to express the old teachings in what they believe is Christian English so as to communicate the ancient outlook, experience, and concepts of their own culture to the wider world. In so doing they hope to reach beyond their own cultures to the majority of the Canadian population, which remains largely ignorant of the richness of Indigenous expression, and Indigenous cultural history and values.

Another aspect of this amalgamation of pre-contact and post-contact cultural expression in rock art is the fact that Indigenous Peoples across the Plateau region, like people in other parts of the continent, had premonitions of the coming of the Europeans, through their dreamers, and particularly, their Prophets. The Prophets, through their dreams, sought to make sense of the continent’s changing social situation and new technology and social organization. In many areas, it appears that rock art records much of this preoccupation. Since the first edition of this book, Chris Arnett has conducted detailed investigations into the rock art of the Stein and explains it to a considerable degree in the context of the general Prophet Movement which preceded the advent of Europeans in much of the area. In his doctoral thesis, Chris writes:

Throughout the sixteen hours of interviews (with Richard Daly), Annie York reiterated these teachings as the central message in the paintings conflating the roles of the Transformer with historical persons described as Prophets. In this way, she grafted the Oral Traditions regarding rock art and the Qʷiqʷƛ̓qʷəƛ̓t with the demographic revitalization movements associated with a known late eighteenth–early nineteenth century historical person, Səxpínłmx, and his contemporaries. Doing so places the production of Nlaka’pamux rock painting into a very specific historical proto-contact context that matches the archaeological data from Nlaka’pamux rock painting sites EbRk-2 and EaRj-81, Teit’s inference of the production of art between ca. 1818 and 1858, and the genealogical data regarding ethnographic accounts of rock-art production.⁶

In a sense, the rock art reflects attempts to bridge the worlds of the pre-contact Plateau with that of the coming Europeans. Annie York’s reading of the images reflects the wonder of the new technology and ways of living that arrived with the Europeans. For example, regarding fig. 58:

He dreams the world that’s going to be. Beside him [right], at that time there was no such thing as pots and pans and big hats. On top, might be a hat or a big pan. He dreamed aaaaaaaaaall the things to come. That’s what he’s dreamed. It tells you these things are coming. It tells of the time that these things will bring. The bottom of that figure, here, it tells that you gonna have a pot that hangs down – a frying pan, anything. This man here, this powerful man is dreaming these things. He tells anything he dreams. He marked it down, even if it hadn’t come into being. The old people all do that.

Finding a bridge of understanding between these two worlds is, in part, what Annie York wanted when she consented to work on this project. Part of her motivation was also fired by the plans of the day to log and otherwise develop the Stein Valley and thereby disturb its unique heritage. Annie also stressed the age-old nature of the knowledge and narratives that accompanied wonder at the new technology. For instance: The biggest game animal has like a beak on him. It might be that he’s very ancient. You see, the dinosaurs had beaks, and the birds got it from them. Very long ago. This is a dream about animals very, very long ago. They had old, old bones at Skaha Lake (fig. 59).

This book project was part of the wider campaign in the 1980s to Save the Stein. Annie agreed to work on this project to show the outside world what Indigenous people mean when they speak of the sacred nature of the Stein River Valley. She was well aware of the ambiguity and hesitancy in the local Indigenous communities regarding the revelation of this knowledge to the wider world. In the end, Annie was ready to put some of her knowledge between the covers of books, thereby challenging the non-Indigenous world to understand, appreciate, enjoy, and above all, respect the rock-writing sites. In so doing she has contributed significantly to the treasury of our national heritage.

I would like, in closing, to thank Arthur Urquhart for his patient hospitality and his incisive grasp of Fraser Canyon history and human nature. I thank Chris’s wife, Barb, and family for their patience and good cheer during the editing marathon for the first edition, done around their kitchen table – and disrupting house renovations and other artistic productions. We both appreciate the time taken to answer our plaguing questions by Kathy York, Nathan Spinks, Louie Phillips, Mary Anderson, Rose Vandrich, Willie and Ina Dick, Willie Justice, Amy Hance, Shirley James, Steve Paul, Rita Haugen, and Rena Bolton. Researchers Gordon Mohs and Sonny McHalsie, Naxaxalhts’i, introduced me to Annie York, and as well contributed information and helped in many ways. My thanks also go to Liv Mjelde, Jan-Marie Martell, Wendy Wickwire, Gerry Freeman, Professor Michael Jackson and Louise Mandell for their informed help and encouragement; and to Edith Iglauer, Karl Siegler, and Andrea Laforet for the hours they devoted to reading and advising on the never-ending manuscript. I am indebted to Sheryl Adam of the University of British Columbia’s library staff for her assistance in finding idiosyncratically catalogued materials from the past century, and to Margaret Alfred of Moricetown who transcribed the tapes. Both Peter Grant and Susan Marsden contributed significantly to the endless process of readying the final manuscript. The project was partially supported by an independent scholar’s grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Finally, I want to point out that some of the Stein writings are very weathered and difficult to distinguish by the untrained eye. Some of these faint writings have been made available to us to study and to present to Annie York for explanation thanks to Chris Arnett’s training and talents. Chris’s drawings are more comprehensive than previous recordings of the Stein rock writings. Virtually his every dot and line had significance for Annie; consequently, the detailed drawings made by Chris were extremely helpful and timely for this project.

As a result of years of acute observation, measurement, reproduction, and pure enthusiasm for the rock writings of southern British Columbia, Chris Arnett has developed an uncanny ability to see the figures in badly eroded, faded, and smudged red ochre paintings. I have stood before some of the Stein figures, side by side with Chris and, while I have seen only indistinct forms, he has been able to read their iconography and record it with precision.⁷

—RICHARD DALY

Oslo, Norway (2019)

NOTES

1 See Michael M’Gonigle and Wendy Wickwire 1988, Stein: The Way of the River for a handsome cultural, historical, and ecological introduction to the Stein Valley.

2 Some of the problems of relating written and oral cultures have been discussed by Cruikshank 1992, Oral Tradition and Material Culture, Multiplying Meanings of ‘Words’ and ‘Things,’ Anthropology Today 8, no. 3: 5–9.

3 The use of the words Shaman and Shamanism is controversial. We agree with Bahn (2010) that Indigenous taxonomy and understanding should be used whenever possible. Romanian American comparative religion specialist Mircea Eliade explains Shamanism as a religious phenomenon on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, in Oceania, and over much of North America and Siberia. The Shaman learns to leave his body at will to embark on quests for psychic power.

4 Səxʷnéʔm, mysterious powerful song (Thompson and Thompson 1992), refers to the source of power, a song given by a guardian spirit (Snéʔm). James Teit, the pioneer ethnographer of Nlaka’pamux fluent in the various dialects, consistently used the word Shaman as an English translation of Səxʷnéʔm. Their speciality has to do with making psychic journeys to find lost souls, whose absence is considered to have lowered the patient’s resistance to disease. Səxʷnéʔm use their songs to make their work more efficacious. In the course of the Səxʷnéʔm’s work they kept up a song given by their Guardian Spirit.

5 Upriver Indigenous Peoples in British Columbia have tended to engage in trade and social relations with both the hunting Peoples of the Northern Boreal Forest and the Interior Plateau terrains to their east, and the more sedentary fishing Peoples of the coast. No doubt the tempo of these exchanges fluctuated through history. For the most part, routes of trade and commerce followed the rivers.

6 Arnett 2016, 347.

7 In July 1988, Chris Arnett and Brian Molyneaux, an authority on rock art across Canada, surveyed the Stein River Valley sites together. Molyneaux concurred with the precision of the renderings made by Chris at each site. All this, of course, happened in the days prior to the revolution in rock-art studies made possible by digital photography and image-enhancing software such as Photoshop and most significantly the DStretch algorithm developed by John Harman (www.dstretch.com). As a result, a few of the drawings in this text are not exact replicates of all that is actually there. Similarly, more paintings have been relocated at every site.

ANNIE ZETCO YORK

(Nlaka’pamux Nation)

Long before the white people they had their own Prophets in this life. And that Prophet told the law everywhere. And wherever he is he write these things, whatever he sees. He travels to the Stein; he travels way, way down to the coast. Everywhere.

In the morning, an old man preaches the young people what to do. It’s to go up in these mountains like that Stein. They spend their life there and God is going to help them, to give them strength. The Indians claimed that place because, for thousands of years, that was just like a university to them.

They go up there [in the mountains], and they sleep, and this dream tells them. Then he writes his dream on the rock. That’s left there forever.

We teach our young people to reverence things. In this life, we have to have water, and we need fire to warm us. Air, food, moon, stars, and sun. The rain comes, then snow. The snow melts into the rivers. It’s the cycle of life. The Stein Valley is like Moses’s mountain, or Rome to the Catholics. These are sacred places.

The reason why Indians strongly demand that that must NEVER be disturbed is because that writing – all those rock writings – they are there to remind the young people that there was a person with knowledge on this earth for thousands of years before people come from Europe.

RENA POINT BOLTON, XWELÍQUIYA

(Stó:lō Nation – Sumas and Skowkale)

If you, young people, want to find out who you are today, you must go back into the history of your people to where your Ancestors travelled on the river, and in the mountains.

The rivers are very sacred to us. All we produce, all we eat and drink eventually goes back, goes out the river to the sea. Even the dust and the fluids of our Ancestors. In the ocean, it’s purified. It comes back as the rain and the mist. It comes back along the valleys as Sláʔqem, the breath of our Ancestors. I hope you understand that this is something that is very sacred to us.

ROSIE ADAMS VANDRICH

(Nlaka’pamux Nation – who lived at the Stein River mouth)

You see, that’s a kind of history to us. If we were able to write long ago there would have been history made through there.

They go in there for maybe a year and practice their work. And they come out of there and they’re Indian doctors – what you call Medicine Men.

That thing in there, that whole valley is just like a giant church to me. Before I go in there, I say my prayers because I seem to be going into something sacred.

LOUIE PHILLIPS

(Nlaka’pamux Nation – April 18, 1993, Lytton, B.C.)

K̓ek̓ázik is over here, across the river, behind these hills. Can’t see it from here. Powerful place. It’s our school. Today the kids drop out of school. They learn from books. In our day we learned by listening to the land. The land talks if you know how to listen. K̓ek̓ázik is where you graduate from. You know, the Bible says Jesus went into the wilderness for forty days and forty nights without food. That’s why the Indians go for that Bible. It’s the same thing with us. Our young people were sent up there to K̓ek̓ázik for ten days. No food, no water. If they stuck it out, they come out, graduated. The mountain, that place talks to them. Some it doesn’t talk to. Some are not successful. Sometimes it’s like that place doesn’t want to teach anybody. It hides away in rain and snow and fog. Even in summer time. That Wendy Wickwire and her husband, they wanted to take youngsters – fourteen- or eighteen-year-olds – in there, as a learning thing. That place didn’t want them. Either it wasn’t ready for them, or they weren’t ready for it.

You were looking for those footprints in the rocks. It’s the same. Either you’re not ready to see them, or they just don’t want to be seen now, not today. Sometimes they are ready to be seen, sometimes not.

That place has two faces, a helping face and a spooky face. When it doesn’t want to help you, it hides its face. A lot of the time it hides its face and it’s not a good place to be. Gets spooky in there, unfriendly.

When you go in any time to train, and you stay ten days, you listen to what nature says to you. You listen and learn and you can come out strong and protected. That’s real Indian education. Kids today go to school. They didn’t know anything about listening to the land. Wherever you go in the mountains, the plants and herbs tell you what they are good for. You tell them what you need to know. Talk to each other. Every tree in that place has something to teach. You stay and learn all there is to learn in that place. Next time you go somewhere else and talk to all the plants in that place. You get knowledge and grow strong. K̓ek̓ázik is the place our young people went to learn. They might stay up to ten days. Not eating or drinking. Learning on that mountain. Did they write their learning on the rocks? Maybe some did, in some of the places. Lots of writings in this country.

Some come to me now and want to be Indian doctors. You want to be an Indian doctor? They want answers right away. I laugh at them. Tell them to go out and sit on the mountain. Listen to nature.

For training to be an Indian doctor, it takes close to four years of going out and staying up in there. You go to a place and stay without food and water. You build your Sweathouse there and you go in and spend the night. You learn there too. You can sing, you pray in the Sweathouse. In the morning, you put on your clothes and travel around that place and listen to the plants and all the living things. (Do this for about ten days.)

The next time you do this, you go five or six miles further. Do it again and learn all there is to learn at that place. You stop one time on top of K̓ek̓ázik, after that on M̓kip and other places. It’s powerful too. Then you move up the valley, five or six miles maybe, all the way up to Cottonwood, learning the power of each creek and the peaks in the area. After about four years you are trained. You have your powers. You tap into the power of the river and all the creeks and mountains. When you come back you’ve learned a lot of what the land can teach you.

CARL GUSTAV JUNG

On science and the dehumanizing of the natural world

Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos. He is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional participation in natural events, which hitherto had a symbolic meaning for him. Thunder is no longer the voice of a god, nor is lightning his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree means a man’s life, no snake is the embodiment of wisdom, and no mountain still harbors a great demon. Neither do things speak to him nor can he speak to things, like stones, springs, plants, and animals. He no longer has a bush-soul identifying him with a wild animal. His immediate communication with nature is gone forever, and the emotional energy it generated has sunk into the unconscious.

(Collected Works)

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

What higher thing can Man in life obtain

Than that the God-Nature should reveal itself to him,

And let the material merge into the spiritual,

As it holds fast what is begotten of the spirit?

(The Maxims and Reflections of J. W. von Goethe)

NOTE ON ORTHOGRAPHY

As far as possible, this second edition has sought to standardize the Nlaka’pamux orthography in keeping with that used in The Thompson River Salish Dictionary: Nłeʔkepmxcín, 1996, compiled by Laurence C. Thompson and M. Terry Thompson (Missoula, MT: University of Montana Press, Occasional Papers in Linguistics, No. 12). An exception is this edition’s use of initial capitals for proper nouns.

1.

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF DREAMS

ROCK ART AND ROCK-ART RESE ARCH IN THE STEIN RIVER VALLEY

CHRIS ARNETT

Since first writing this chapter much has changed in my focus on this subject. I would still call it an archaeology of dreams. In 2016 I completed my Ph.D., Rock Art of Nlaka’pamux: Indigenous Theory and Practice on the Columbia Plateau, in which I compiled thirty years of research combining archaeological, ethnographic, and historic sources. The work bolstered Annie York’s insights by placing them in the historical context of rock-art production (what might be termed "the time